Discourse Communities

  Academic Discourse is a Public Activity

                The Publication Cycle: Talking About the Talk

You are not a passive receiver of knowledge.  Every time you sit in a discussion group or write a paper, you are an active member of the invisible college.

Take particular note of the public in publication. There are many institutions who feel they have a stake in growing research, and most of them realize the advantage of making the resultant information public. Knowledge grows best if it is at once transparent and rigorously examined. That requires a very specialized system of sharing and vetting.

Professors are highly specialized, and those residing at any given institution rarely share specific specializations. We are spread out, providing access to our specialties to our students, colleagues, and communities. Therefore, we find it necessary to develop extra-university relationships through memberships in professional societies. Those professional relationships are called the 'invisible college,' and professors often go to conferences to present papers in order to maintain them. This, plus their professional reading, is what permits professors to keep up to date in their highly specialized fields. There are a very great many ways those contributions can happen. In fact, this website is one of them.

But believe me, you don't want a professor who 'just teaches,' who has no interest in staying abreast of his or her field, researching issues, and sharing insites with others. Why? Because you are likely to get out of date information served up by someone who couldn't care less about it.

After scholars have communicated informally with colleagues via the invisible college, performed literature searches, and consulted with their own professional reading collections, they develop a research design for a specific research project. Often, that in turn is examined and passed upon, often as part of grant cycles that provide the funding for their research. Grants are provided by a variety of sources, most notably the universities themselves, federal and state government institutions, and even private corporations.

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Resources

"The Knowedge Cycle" graph from University of Washington Libraries, 1999.

McElroy, M. W. (2003). The New Knowledge Management: complexity, learning and sustainable innovation. New York: Butterworth Heinemann)

Dr. Bonnie Duncan
2002; Last revised June 13, 2007
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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